“Her Violent Character”: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants, Gender, and Crime in Tucumán, Argentina, 1914–20

Much of the scholarship on immigrants in modern Latin America focuses on either the successful integration of a particular group (Moya 1998, Baily 1999, Borges 2009, Valverde 2007) or the bigotry kept by local societies (Lesser 1994, Solberg 1972).  While both trends have contributed to understanding the variety and place of immigrants in Latin American politics, economy and society, the scholarship offers little about less-fortunate immigrants who suffered from the vagaries of economic cycles or what the materials consequences were due to social and institutional prejudice.  Even less is known about the gendered experience of adaptation and integration into local Latin American societies in the era of mass migration.  This paper offers an initial attempt to address these historiographical gaps by examining immigrant Arabic-speaking men and women – both perpetrators and victims of crimes – residing in northwestern Argentina during World War I to assess how class and gender directly played into logic of crime and punishment in modern Latin America.

The paper argues that a defendant or plaintiff’s gender was more consequential than national identity in receiving harsher or lighter prison sentences.  Arabic-speaking women were seemingly more likely to suffer severer sentences than their male compatriots.  Also, the immigrant community at large played decisive roles in the evolution of cases and subsequent outcomes.  This presentation utilizes criminal court proceedings, Spanish and Arabic newspaper accounts, data from provincial statistical annuals and census manuscripts to better situate these immigrants in an era of socioeconomic turbulence and rapid change.  It intends to highlight the personal insecurity many immigrants and Argentines experienced during this period of economic malaise and what the manifest and legal consequences were for plebian Arabic-speakers.